Toshi and I lived just down the street from each other, our block a couple of miles, an easy bike ride, to Jay’s place. Picture Toshi: tall and skinny and Asian-looking from his mother’s side only, straight dark bangs in his eyes, red or yellow or blue t-shirts over jeans that ride up a little, but even a little is too much in high school. His parents divorced, mom moved back to Singapore, the place she was working when she met Toshi’s dad. The fact that neither Toshi nor I have a mother anywhere nearby is strange for suburban Delaware, and I think it sort of brought us together. Not that we would share a good cry over our lost mommies, but that we could throw each other a look across the classroom when the teacher lamented that obviously our mothers had never taught us all how to use a tissue.
Jay is white, like me and basically most of the kids in our class, but beyond that similarity, we are pretty opposite looking: I have dark, wavy hair, blue eyes, and compared to Toshi and Jay, I’m sort of short. Jay is even taller than Toshi, with a blond crew cut and squint-hard brown eyes. A year ago, Jay had looked more like me, but then he sprouted up, a bit gangly, but muscled, with a sometimes-deep voice, a lump in the center of his throat, hair bristling from his face, and a new smell like hardboiled eggs. Jay is the only one of us to have a tattoo: a geometric construction etched on the back of his neck. He told us once that it was the earth, then another time that it was a Hindu punctuation mark, and then he even said it was supposed to be a zebra’s eyeball.
Jay’s got this drive to stay busy, to always be doing, and so he spun projects out of thin air, a web that always caught me and Toshi. One time, he stole eggs out of chicken coops across the county, then pressed us into helping him sell them at the grocer’s. When the man would not buy, the eggs ended up smashed across the glass doors of his store. In fourth grade, Jay documented every movement of a chubby girl named Christina. He kept this notebook on her—scratched nose three times in a row, tapped heels of shoes together—and used it to convince us that she was a witch. We ended up swiping a lighter from Toshi’s dad and cornering her on the playground. Jay burned her on the forearm, to brand her as a sorceress, he said, as I stood guard and watched her scream. Remorse gave me a rash afterwards, and when Christina moved away in the sixth grade, I felt relieved that I would no longer catch sight of her in the hallway and be overwhelmed by a wash of guilt.
This particular project, New Veronia, seemed harmless, with its main goal literally constructive: who could we hurt while building cabins out in the woods?
Into the backyard we marched behind the penis flag; our pockets bulged with chips and sodas. The second-story window of Stella’s bedroom hung open, red curtains jerking in the breeze, and I entertained a brief daydream of me climbing up there to find her naked on the bed. As the woods deepened around us, Toshi began to pause every few yards to pick up a rock or scratch at the earth with a stick. “Damp,” he kept muttering, “damp, damp, damp.” Probably he was worried about the dampness breeding disease. He would get these strange headaches—he described them to me once as a worm crunching slowly through an apple, and that apple was his brain.
“Keep it up, Knees,” Jay said. “Find us a stable foundation for New Veronia and all that. Over there”—Jay pointed the flag east—“is this hillock thing. Let’s go check it out.”
The spot was maybe three-quarters of a mile off from the house, and as soon as I set foot on it, I knew that it was our place.
The woods in Delaware have tall, strong trees with branches that start high up and not an overabundance of undergrowth. Deer and squirrels and birds and skunks rustle the leaves, and the sky up past the branches is usually a cottony blue. The heavy air sits against your skin like sweat, and it smells like something is dying and being born all at once.
Toshi, who had been poking at the ground on our hillock, stood up and said, “This might be as dry as we’re going to find.”
“Just the place to get our dicks wet.” Jay whooped and started to climb a tree. He made the top in an instant. He was the most physical of us; he played soccer and challenged us to pushup contests. “Hey!” he yelled from the top of the tree. “Hey, I can see the ocean from here! We got ocean views! The ladies are going to love that.”
“It’s the bay,” Toshi said under his breath. “Not the ocean.” He paced among the trees, his steps aligned heel-to-toe. “All these trees are in the way,” he told me. “We’ll need to cut down a bunch of them. This is how pollution starts, you know: one tree makes almost two hundred and sixty pounds of oxygen in a year.”
Jay jumped from the lowest branch; his body fell from the sky to the ground. “Looks like there’s enough room for a little house over here, and one over here, and one here. We can make the bear trap right here.”
I said, “Or maybe… we could build kind of like the polygamists, with one big house, but three separate entrances? A triplex, basically.”
“Gross,” Jay said. “Polygamists?”
“I saw a documentary. You get, like, eight wives for one guy.”
“I don’t want to share walls with you. Then you’ll hear all the nasty stuff I’m into and get jealous.” Jay humped the air.
Toshi came out from behind a tree. “You know, the triplex would need less materials. It would probably save time. Three separate houses will be way too hard. But one triplex… we’d just need to build it stable. We wouldn’t want one wall to make our whole place fall down.”
“Don’t worry, Knees.” Jay knuckled Toshi’s head. “We’ll build it good.”
“Build it, and they will come,” Toshi said. “Maybe.”
“They will come so hard,” I said, and the guys whooped with joy.
Once we all stopped laughing, Jay said, “Yep, this is it. New Veronia,” as if he’d come up with the name of our town, and not me. He said it again, drawing the syllables out like a song, and then he lifted the flag and planted it deep into the hillock.
Chapter 2
The three of us had spent a fair amount of time out in the woods that surrounded every housing development in Delaware. Sometimes the woods came right into the backyards, like at Jay’s fairly isolated house, where his parents didn’t seem much interested in cultivating anything that resembled a lawn.
A month into the third grade, at our first sleepover, Jay, Toshi, and I took an old army surplus tent, some flashlights, and a bag of marshmallows out into the woods behind Jay’s place and set up camp. The evening had riled me straight off: I had expected Jay’s parents to introduce themselves, his mom to serve me dinner, his dad to check over our camping gear, but instead, the grownups were absent. The house felt inappropriate with just the kids running it, but exciting, too: there was no one telling us what to do. We ate a block of cheese, threw a cup of water on Toshi when he came out of the bathroom, and yelled through Stella’s closed bedroom door that there were spiders crawling up through the toilet. At that point, she hadn’t yet become the love of my life.
After we’d made it out to the campsite, Jay told the first ghost story. His father had been telling him tales about the Zimzee for years by then, so he had a nice store to draw from. “The Zimzee,” he’d said, “is a tall, skinny creature that looks like a man, but with tree bark for skin. All dark brown. He don’t got a face, just holes where his face things should be, and his bark is covered in stuff that looks like moss. Only it ain’t moss, because it’s the dead skin of all the kids he eats.
“He wanders around in parks or maybe outside kids’ houses and stands still until they get close. He looks like a tree, but not really like a tree, so the kids go up to check him out, and that’s when he grabs them. He skins you real fast and then eats you; his mouth is like a wood chipper. And this crazy old coon, he hangs your skin on his body to dry cause he likes to turn it into beef jerky and chew on it later.